


Expensive Mistakes

by Green_Heart88



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Swapfell (Undertale), Amputation, Angst, Dysfunctional Family, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Past Child Abuse, Power Dynamics, Swapfell Papyrus (Undertale), Swapfell Sans (Undertale), Trauma, Unhealthy Relationships, bad times all around
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 20:22:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28801257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Green_Heart88/pseuds/Green_Heart88
Summary: Rus is trying his best.  Too bad his best isn't good enough.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Expensive Mistakes

On the day it happened, Rus had been killing time at Muffet’s, posted up in his usual spot at the bar and nursing his third drink of the day.

Unsurprising. He was here most days; a tired pattern he had fallen into.

Muffet’s was a nice enough place. Sweet-smelling and warm, cozy even, provided you didn’t mind the thick coating of webs over the walls and the swarm of spiders that occupied the ceiling, occasionally rappelling down onto unsuspecting patrons. After one had dropped directly into his eye socket Rus learned it was best not to look up if he could help it.

Several of the regulars milled around behind him, following their own predictable routines. Rus sipped the tail end of his drink, watching them from under hooded eyes through the mirror over the bar. Just six months living in this town and he already had each of them pegged. Then again, the Snowdin crowd wasn’t exactly a complicated lot.

The drunk bunny, Tabitha, practically lived here. She was slumped low in the nearest booth, glassy-eyed and humming to herself, practically passing out over her glass. The only thing that kept her alive was the fact that killing her was more trouble than it was worth. Her family ran half the town and pissing them off wasn’t worth the easy kill. She had practically no EXP to give anyway. It was a lousy risk/reward ratio by anyone’s calculations. She had been here when he arrived and she would be here long after he left. She wasn’t worth more than a passing glance.

Sitting at the bar a few seats down from him were the red bird and the sloppy fish: Joline and Spitz. Another pair of town drunks that skated through life by virtue of being too pathetic to bother killing. They never did much, but they listened in on everyone’s conversations and they love, love,  _ loved _ to gossip. Rus got some of his best information from them for the low cost of a few pints of beer and a friendly smile.

In the far corner, Greater Dog was hurriedly licking the last of his lunch bowl clean. It was odd to see him without the rest of his pack, but not something to be worried over. Despite his stature, Greater Dog wasn’t one to instigate fights on his own; a gentle giant, as much as this world allowed for such things. Not too much going on in his head, Rus suspected. The big mutt relied on Dogaressa to do most of his thinking for him and point him at whatever needed biting. Rus watched disinterestedly as Greater Dog dropped his now spotless bowl to the table with a clatter and went bounding out the door without a backwards glance. Rus faintly heard Muffet huff a sigh. One more thing she’d be adding to the dog pack’s tab.

The dog pack’s usual table was currently occupied by two bears and a wolf playing cards: Rollo, Otso, and James. These three were the only potential trouble in the place. They lived on the outskirts of town where things were rougher, and each had a decent amount of LV and a reputation for playing dirty. Rus’s attention focused on Rollo as he lost the latest hand. The massive brown bear grumbled and swore as he lurched to his feet and headed for the bar. 

Rus watched warily as Rollo cut a slightly unsteady line in his direction. It had been nearly a month since the last time anyone got up the nerve to try attacking him. It made Rus jumpy, knowing that the next fight was both inevitable and overdue. He tensed slightly, shifting his grip on the heavy pint glass in his hand, readying his magic as he watched the bear make his way closer and closer.

It was almost a relief when Rus saw Rollo’s head turn slightly, his beady little black eyes landing on his back. Rus could see Rollo thinking about it, blearily considering his chances:  _ Rus had been here a while. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe he wasn’t quite on top of his game today. _ Rus knew he looked tired. The bags under his eye sockets were so dark they practically looked like bruises.

Then he felt the faint tickle of a Check hitting him. He smirked as he saw Rollo’s heavy-set mouth twitch in dismay. 

_ Oh yes, those are awfully high STATS aren’t they, you stupid backwoods prick _ , Rus thought tensely.

Rollo swallowed hard and finally looked up far enough to make eye contact with Rus through the mirror. The little jump he did as he noticed Rus calmly staring back at him was gratifying. Even more gratifying was how he quickly averted his eyes and lumbered off to the farthest side of the bar to order a fresh round of drinks for his table, putting as much distance between himself and the lanky skeleton as possible.

Rus’s smirk widened.

It was good to know his reputation was still holding.

When they had first arrived in Snowdin, Rus really had his work cut out for him. For the first few weeks the locals had practically been crawling out of the woodwork to gawk at him and Sans, sizing them up, testing their reactions and defenses. 

Rus had played it cool, falling back on the familiar habits that had mostly served him well in the past. He kept Sans glued to his side, sauntering through town like he owned the place, smirking widely to show off his gold canines and casting truly unimpressed looks at anyone who looked like they were even thinking of making trouble.

He had wandered down the road and into Muffet’s – clearly the central hub of this rinky-dink little backwater – claimed a seat he liked, threw out an off-color joke that startled a laugh out of Spitz, and slapped down an appreciable amount of gold on the counter for Muffet. When someone came up behind him and claimed that he was sitting in  _ their _ spot, Rus calmly raised a hand and slammed the unsuspecting monster into the ceiling hard enough to shake dust (and several dozen spiders) from the rafters. Then, cool as you please, he winked at Muffet and proceeded to order lunch for himself and his brother.

No one needed to know his soul was hammering hard enough in his chest that it felt like his ribs would crack.

All that mattered was that no one tried to take that seat from him ever again.

That had been the start of his reputation in Snowdin.

Over the next few weeks and months, he solidified it further. 

He made a show of being completely at ease in his new home. He meandered around, made friendly chitchat and dirty jokes, and came on to some of the more appealing denizens of the town.  _ No one here is a threat to me _ , he said with every little flirtation or favor or toothy smile.  _ If everyone plays nice we won’t have any problems _ , he assured them each time he stopped into Muffet’s for a drink and a meal, cracking jokes with the regulars and listening more than he spoke.  _ Just don’t cross me and we’ll all be fine. _

Of course people crossed him anyway. This was the Underground. It was ‘kill or be killed,’ no matter how much Rus tried to avoid it.

So, Rus did what he did in response to violence directed his way – he freaked people out.

The truth of the matter was that Rus was  _ not _ a strong monster but he was a  _ weird _ one, and he was really good at playing a part.

The moment anyone started anything, Rus dropped his friendly, flirty mystery man persona and got straight down to business. He wasn’t loud about it – there was no snarling or shouting, no taunts or jibes when he fought. He was cold and quiet and absolutely brutal in his retaliation, using blue magic and bones to pummel his opponents into submission until they cried for mercy. Even more unsettling was the fact no one ever was able to get so much as a glancing hit on him. He moved like a man possessed, and as soon as the fight was over, he would turn the charm and laid-back grin back on like nothing had even happened. Like a switch being flipped.

_ That _ freaked people out just as much as the way he fought. It gave him the air of being slightly unhinged, and most people in town quickly decided messing with him just wasn’t worth it. Better to stay on his good side. That suited Rus just fine. He’d rather be considered dangerous and crazy than have people know the truth.

Keeping up the act and keeping people afraid of him was crucial. Both his and Sans’s lives depended on it.

Rus was under no illusions. People  _ did not _ like his brother. Sans was a handful – brash, prickly, and prone to being rude at the very worst of times. Rus had done his best to get Sans to fly under the radar, but his little brother had a desire for recognition and respect that would not be denied. There was no such thing as ‘under the radar’ for Sans, so Rus had given into the inevitability of his brother’s personality with the same exhausted acceptance of a drowning man giving into the current of a raging river.

‘Petulant little shithead’ was just what Sans was and Rus had to deal with it.

For years, Rus had thanked his lucky stars that Empress Toriel was so firm about children being protected from any serious violence. The stripes Sans wore kept him safe throughout his childhood, and the minute he aged out of them (long after Sans had actually aged out of them, as Rus had used Sans’s naturally slight physique and baby face to pass him off as underage for as long as he could), Rus had slapped a collar on him. 

It was a nice collar. Rus had made sure of that, going the extra mile to dye it the same reddish-purple as Sans’s eyelights. It looked good on him, which Rus thought would make it easier for Sans to accept it. Even from a young age, Sans had been very particular about the way he looked, and matching colors tended to please him. But more important than how Sans felt about the collar, was the fact that that little strip of leather and metal provided an extra level of protection for him. At a glance, anyone could tell that Sans wasn’t just some nobody that could be messed with, consequence free. He  _ belonged _ to someone. He _ mattered _ . Someone cared about him and would be very,  _ very  _ upset if anything happened to him.

The fact that Rus made sure to pack the collar with enough protective intent to zap someone cross-eyed if they laid an ill-intentioned hand on Sans helped too. 

As did Rus’s tendency to keep tabs on his little brother as much as possible. If the collar wasn’t enough of a deterrent, seeing Rus ghost up out of the shadows, radiating cold malice usually got the message across. Sans was off limits because Rus said so, and for a long time that was enough, even on the dangerous streets of New Home. His carefully cultivated reputation protected both of them.

Too bad Sans didn’t want to be protected.

Sans  _ hated  _ the collar and he  _ hated  _ the way Rus kept playing mother hen with him. The later he got into his teen years, the more he bucked Rus’s authority. Now that they were in Snowdin, it felt like Rus barely saw his brother. As soon as he had felt comfortable enough to loosen the metaphorical leash a little, Sans took the slack and ran with it, reacting like a half-feral dog suddenly freed to explore and antagonize the locals to his heart’s content. 

Lately, Sans had begun spending most of his time out in the woods, developing increasingly more complicated and violent traps in an attempt to impress Captain Alphys on her rare visits through town. He was nearly of age to be able to join the Royal Guard, and he made no secret of it that he craved the power and prestige of that position more than anything. 

The rare times that Sans  _ was _ at home, his interactions with Rus usually involved screamed insults and slammed doors. On the good days he would just stare coldly at him, as if expecting Rus to do a trick. At this rate, Rus didn’t know how much longer he would be able to keep a grip on his spiraling, angry little brother.

Sometimes, he found himself not even caring much anymore, and that bothered him most of all.

He didn’t know where he had gone so wrong.

He was such a shitty older brother. No wonder Sans was such a mess.

Rus was running through those familiar, tired thoughts as he sipped his way through his cider. He was supposed to be meeting Sans soon. Something about his little brother wanting to show off his latest creation and have Rus go over the finer points of it for any possible flaws. 

Rus knew he should be happy about Sans’s unexpected request for his company and opinion. It was nothing short of a miracle that his headstrong little brother was still willing to admit that Rus was still the more technically skilled of the two of them. Try as he might, Sans never could quite catch up to what Rus could do with magic, scrap metal, and a gung-ho attitude. It was a point of pride for Rus. Not that he’d ever admit it.

The thought of Sans actually asking for his help with something (like he used to, when things were better between them) should have sparked some happiness in him, some sense of pride and nostalgia. Instead, Rus just felt tired. 

Tired of dealing with Sans and his attitude. Tired of fighting  _ with _ him, and tired of having to fight  _ for _ him when he picked fights with other monsters, only for Sans to turn on him instead. Tired of having to constantly watch both of their backs. Tired of never dropping his guard, never slipping up, never letting on how anxious and barely in control he felt on a daily basis. Tired of it feeling like Sans was actively trying to make things harder for both of them. 

He really had to figure out a way to reel Sans in before his brother’s ego got them both killed…

Rus downed the last of his drink and thoughtfully swirled the remainder in the bottom of the glass. This had been his third cider: his self-appointed cut-off point. He didn’t dare to get too drunk in public; no point in making an easy target of himself. But… he didn’t feel  _ too _ buzzed yet. And this was a particularly tasty new batch of cider…

Rus glanced up at the clock over the bar.

12: 07

Huh, whoops. He was officially late and Sans was sure to already be fuming as he waited. Rus could picture it now – Sans scowling out at the road, arms crossed, foot tapping in the snow as he grew increasingly more impatient. His little brother couldn’t stand a lot of things, but tardiness was definitely in the top five. Rus was in for a bad time no matter when he showed up now.

He paused, considering.

_ Sans has been such a little shit lately _ , Rus decided.  _ Let him wait a little longer. _

He ordered one last drink before hitting the road.

By the time he got going, it was pushing 12:20 and the ciders were finally kicking in. Rus waved a lazy goodbye to Muffet and the regular crowd as he shouldered his way out the door and onto the main road. A moment later he stepped out of a familiar shortcut a mile away, deep in Snowdin Forest.

The road was empty.

Rus blinked and did a quick 360, searching around for a sign of his brother. This is where Sans said to meet him, right by the little shack they had constructed together to store their trap-making supplies in. Rus checked the shack to see if Sans had gone inside to get out of the snow that was gently drifting down, but no. It was still locked up tight, the simple traps and wards to keep thieves out still in place.

Odd…

Rus scratched his jaw, starting to feel uneasy. 

This wasn’t like Sans. Rus had his little brother’s habits down to a tee, and he knew that Sans wouldn’t come looking for him unless he was  _ at least _ half an hour late. With ten minutes to spare, Sans should still be here, fuming up a storm and waiting to lay into him.

Rus shook his head, trying to clear it and think. He wasn’t drunk by any means, but he was a little fuzzy, a little slow on the up-take. That’s why it took him so long to finally register all the footprints covering the ground. He blinked slowly, trying to force himself to focus, his sense of unease growing.

There were a  _ lot _ of prints here.

Some of them were familiar. Amid the mess, it was easy to pick out Sans’ boot prints along the edges, clearly pacing back and forth on the side of the road as he waited. The dogs’ tracks were familiar too. He had seen those enough times to pick out which ones belonged to Dogamy and Dogaressa. Doggo too – his were a little larger, and Lesser Dog as well, his dainty little paw prints dancing around the others excitedly. The entire pack had been here, minus Greater Dog. 

It was strange for them to be in this part of the forest. They usually only came out this way if they were tracking someone… But here… Rus could see where they had walked purposefully up to this spot and then stopped, seemingly milling around aimlessly before heading back in the direction they came. It was weird. He didn’t understand.

Just barely visible underneath the dog tracks were a mess of footprints Rus didn’t recognize. They headed off in the opposite direction, further down the path and then over and through a snow bank, into the woods. That was even weirder. Rus followed them curiously, tilting his head and trying to place who they could belong to. Not many monsters came out this way if they didn't have to, but there were four… five… six… (more?) distinctive sets of unfamiliar prints here. And here and there, where they hadn’t been trampled over and covered up, Rus could see Sans’ smaller footprints heading the same direction, leading the way.

A group of people following Sans out into the forest…? 

From somewhere off in the distance, muffled by the snow and trees, came a scream. Rus felt his magic run cold.

He broke into a run.

Rus scrambled through the snow after the footprints, dodging low branches and fallen trees. The path was erratic – it twisted and turned like it was trying to throw him off, and not knowing where it led, he couldn’t shortcut to the end. All he could do was follow it and run and listen as the sounds of fighting  _ somewhere _ up ahead began getting louder and louder.

The trees were so thick that Rus didn’t see the clearing until he burst into it, nearly tripping over himself to avoid plowing straight through a pile of dust.

He recovered quickly amidst the churned up snow, orienting himself to the sound of angry screaming, the hum and impact of attacks, the smell of dust heavy on the air. The fight hadn’t been going on long, but it had clearly been vicious. Several lumps of dust lay strewn over the field of battle, obtrusively gray on the otherwise white background. Rus didn’t have time to count how many. Bright flashes of magic and sprays of snow snapped his attention over to the left where two unfamiliar figures still fought on, their backs to him as they struggled to maintain their footing in the deep snow.

Just past them was Sans, elevated on a platform of bones, surrounded by a defensive ring of jagged bone bullets, and absolutely screeching his head off at his attackers.

Rus caught sight of him just in time to see an unexpected attack flash in low and take his leg off.

Time slowed down.

It wasn’t even Rus’s doing. At least not consciously. He was just as frozen as everyone else, watching in horror as the next few seconds played out.

He watched Sans’s furious expression drop into a strange, blank shock. It was the same sort of look he had worn the first time he had truly mouthed off to Rus and Rus had slapped him hard across the face. Like he couldn’t even process what had just happened.

The circle of bone bullets sputtered out of existence as Sans’s concentration broke, appearing for just a split second as a glittering, wispy purple halo of dissipated magic around him. It was almost pretty. Beneath Sans’s feet, the platform crumbled away into nothingness.

Rus watched, still in slow motion, as gravity kicked in and Sans fell. 

It was only a five foot drop but Sans crumbled on impact like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Then time did something funny again and without realizing he was even moving, Rus was on the other side of the clearing, crouching in the snow over his brother. The two other monsters hung suspended six feet in the air, skewered on a field of wickedly sharp bones that hadn’t been there a moment before. Rus had just enough time to scan their faces before they dusted on his attack, dispassionately noting that he actually recognized one of them.

Then he reached out and scooped up Sans’s severed leg, put a hand on his shoulder, and shortcut the two of them out of there before the dust had time to hit the ground.

They landed hard in their living room, Sans bouncing as he impacted the couch cushions, Rus catching himself awkwardly on the arm of the couch, trying to get his feet fully underneath him as he went from crouching to standing midair. His eyes were locked on Sans even as he floundered for balance.

Sans was moving sluggishly, as if he were trying to wake up from a dream. There was a stunned, unprocessing look on his face. His arms reached around as if expecting snow only to bump into the back of the couch instead. Further down on the couch, a single snowy boot slowly dragged its way across the cushions as Sans’s right leg searched for purchase. 

Next to it, a jagged point of bone that used to be a femur jerked uselessly in the air.

Rus felt a wave of nausea hit him as he realized he was still clutching the remaining two thirds of Sans’s left leg. He couldn’t be sure if it was his imagination or not when he thought he felt it twitch in his grasp.

With a lurch, Rus staggered forward and dropped to his knees next to his brother, trying to line the pieces up.

“Shit, shit, oh shit, shit,” he muttered like a mantra as he took hold of the pieces in each hand. “Oh please, oh shit, please…”

Next to him, Sans began coming out of whatever stupor he was in because he took a stilted sort of inhale, almost jerked the stump of his ruined leg out of Rus’s hand, and let out an ear-piercing shriek as Rus’s fingers accidentally skidded over some of the rough edges.

“Shut up!” Rus snapped, not knowing what else to do. For the first time ever, he was thankful that raised voices weren’t an unusual occurrence in their house. Sans was almost certainly audible from the street, but at this point no one would think anything of it. Sans let out another pained wail as Rus jammed the pieces of bone together and poured as much healing magic into them as he could muster. 

Healing had never been his forte. 

The bone fused… broke apart… fused again…

Broke again…

“No, no, c’mon… please…” Rus poured everything he had into it. 

The connection burned bright for a moment and then went dull, the worst of the splintered edges of the severed limb beginning to deteriorate into a fine dust.

“No, no, please, no…”

Rus kept trying right up to the moment when the leg fell apart in his hand, dissolving into a thick layer of dust. Most of it fell directly onto the couch and floor. A little ended up in his hand, delicately laying on top of his bones, filtering into his joints.

Rus drew two short swift breaths in and out, trying not to panic.

Next to him Sans was making noises he had never heard come out of his brother’s mouth before. If they were words, Rus couldn’t tell what they were. He watched in a sort of numb shock as Sans’s trembling hand began reaching down, down, down, closing in on the empty space where his leg used to be.

It was a mercy when he passed out before he reached it.

It was all Rus’s fault…

He sat there next to the couch for a very long time, that single thought playing over and over in his head.

His only comfort was that Sans wasn’t dead yet. He knew this because at some point he had taken up a vice-like grip on Sans’s forearm, refusing to let go, and as long as he had a grip on Sans’s arm then Sans wasn’t dust. He was still there. He was still okay.

The scent of death burned in Rus’s nose.

He kept thinking back to the clearing in the woods.

He knew one of the monsters; A member of a gang that Rus had sometimes associated with in the past, before their new lives here. He hadn’t left New Home on the best of terms. There had been some hanging threads, some unresolved disputes. He had gotten himself into some things he shouldn’t have and panicked and ran when things got too hot to handle. Their exit had been fast and messy and he should have known better.

No one got away with anything down here. You were either mean and scary enough to do what you wanted, or you dealt with the consequences. Rus clearly hadn’t been as mean and scary as he thought, and now six months later, it had come back to bite him. 

God, this was all his fault. Every last piece of it.

If he hadn’t had that last drink…

If he hadn’t been late on purpose…

If he had just kept a better eye on Sans…

If he hadn’t fucked up things so badly in New Home…

If he wasn’t such a fucking failure…

_ If he had just been a better brother in the first place… _

Eventually, Rus found the strength to turn around and assess the damage.

The attack had hit Sans’s leg in the worst possible way. Instead of making a clean cut through, the blow had splintered the bone at an angle, cracking the femur and leaving it to terminate in several inches of jagged, splintered bone. Reddish-purple magic still oozed slowly from the wound, soaking into the couch cushion beneath. Rus dully thought that if he was awake to see that, Sans would be pissed. It was surely already setting a permanent stain into the couch.

On autopilot, Rus lurched to his feet to fetch some towels.

_ The bone shard would be a problem _ , Rus thought in a detached sort of way as he slipped a towel between Sans’s leg and the couch a few minutes later and distractedly began using a corner to dab at the seeping wound.  _ It was too thin and brittle to bear any weight. Too jagged to not catch on things constantly. It was pointless now. Just a ruined remainder. It had to come off. _

In a daze, Rus left again to fetch some of his tools from the basement.

Truth be told, the hacksaw wasn’t the best choice for the job, but it was all Rus had. In a numb sort of haze, Rus cut away the worst of the damage on his brother’s leg, pausing every so often to clean out the teeth of saw as they became gummed up with dust and magic.

He had never done anything like this before. Never  _ seen _ anything like this. In Rus’s experience, every wound he had ever come across had either been a glancing blow or a killing one. He had never seen a monster come away from a fight missing a major piece of their body and live to tell about it.

At this point, he wasn’t sure if he was even trying to save Sans, or just…  _ tidy _ him up  _ (Sans was so particular about how he looked) _ for when he inevitably…

Rus yanked himself away from that train of thought with a sharp shake of his head, bodily trembling as he looked down at his brother.

The leg looked better now. Neater at least, terminating in a clean cut instead of a jagged mess.

… It was still bleeding. Still seeping magic that Sans couldn’t afford to lose. 

Rus let the saw drop to the ground and went to find the iron.

He didn’t know what possessed him to think of it (maybe something he had seen in a movie a long time ago and had subconsciously absorbed), but cauterization seemed like the thing to do. He heated it up and then with the same sort of detached efficiency he had done everything else with, held the flat heated surface flush with the open wound.

The smell was indescribable.

Rus held the iron in place for as long as he dared, pouring healing magic into the leg the whole while as the bone steamed and magic burned. By the time he cautiously withdrew, the edges of the bone were slightly browned and the pulpy center was a mass of char. It, however, was no longer bleeding.

Rus nodded once to himself, put the iron carefully down where it wouldn’t catch the carpet on fire, and promptly went to vomit into the sink.

Sans awoke sometime later that evening, groggy and disoriented. Rus had moved him up to his room (away from the mess and the smell downstairs), and tucked him gently into his bed. Now he watched, tense and anxious from Sans’s desk chair as his little brother began to stir.

“Huh… wha…?” Sans mumbled thickly, his arms struggling against the weight of the blankets. His head turned to the side and caught sight of Rus and he started trying to sit up, not sure what was happening, but already incensed by the sight of his brother. “Why’re you – ?” He began to ask.

The pain hit him like a truck. Sans went suddenly stiff, his face scrunching up as he drew in a sharp breath through his bared teeth. Sans was familiar with pain – he had had his fair share of fights and training accidents, but nothing like this. Nothing even approaching this. Underneath the pain, Rus could see confusion and fear bloom in Sans’s eyes, then a flash of blind panic. Before Rus could stop him, Sans ripped back the covers and exposed his amputated limb. 

He let out a strange, involuntary high-pitched noise at the sight of it.

“Sans…” Rus started to say.

“Fuck… Oh FUCK…” Panic was the only thing keeping Sans upright, eclipsing the pain and driving him to lean forward to examine the wound. He frantically patted at the bed underneath the stump like it was some sort of optical illusion – a trick Rus was playing on him, and if he could just  _ touch  _ his leg, which was clearly only invisible and not  _ missing, _ everything would be okay. He shook as he confirmed there really was nothing there.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck…” He gingerly touched the bandages that Rus had done his best with. Even the gentle press of his own fingers through several layers of gauze made him flinch away in pain.

“Sans, I’m… sorry…” Rus muttered miserably. “I tried…”

Sans’s head snapped up to stare at him, sockets wide-eyed and wild.

“You  _ TRIED?” _ Sans’s voice was high-pitched and brittle. He sounded like he was on the verge of hysteria. “Tried  _ what?? _ What  _ IS  _ this?” He gestured jerkily down at the stump, “What am I supposed to do with  _ THIS?? _ ”

Rus opened his mouth, hesitated, and closed it again uselessly. He didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t even fully expected Sans to wake up at all. This could have just as easily been a death vigil as he waited for his little brother to Fall and dust completely. But now here they were, Rus with no plan and Sans beginning to panic.

“My leg… oh god, my leg…” Sans was back to staring at his missing limb, his shoulders heaving as he fought for breath, visibly trembling. Rus watched with growing alarm as tears began to well in Sans’s eye sockets and then trickle down his cheekbones. He hadn’t seen Sans cry openly in years, not even during the worst of their knock-down, drag-out fights when they screamed the most terrible things they could think of at each other. Sans had always just taken whatever was thrown at him with a snarl and a snap, and thrown it back twice as nastily. 

Now he was dissolving into a full-on panic attack, his hands trembling in midair like without his leg, he didn’t know what to do with his remaining limbs.

Rus’s soul gave a painful lurch and without thinking about it, he crossed the room in three quick strides and knelt on the floor by his brother’s side. Sans wasn’t supposed to be like this. Sans was supposed to be loud and angry and so goddamn full of himself that it set Rus’s teeth on edge. This small, trembling version of his brother was something he didn’t know how to deal with.

It had been so long since Sans accepted, let alone  _ wanted _ comforting from him, Rus wasn’t sure he remembered how to do it anymore.

He hesitated, not quite touching Sans’s shaking shoulder, opting at the last moment to grip onto the edge of the mattress instead.

“Sans,” he murmured, doing his best to sound gentle. It sounded more abrupt than he meant it to. Sans jerkily looked over at him through his tears, his eyelights lighting and guttering out irregularly as he completely lost control. Whether it was more from pain or terror, Rus couldn’t tell.

Very carefully, he moved his hand up to gently grip Sans’s forearm again, an echo of the way he had held it earlier. A way to steady both of them. Sans didn’t even seem to register it.

... Rus didn’t know what to say.

What could he say to make this better? Sans was horribly injured, and even if he lived through this, his life would never be the same again. Rus couldn’t even begin to fathom what the future might look like for him now; for either of them.

“I’m… I’m here,” was all he could manage, and god did it sound broken and small. He was supposed to be in charge, keep things together, keep them both safe. He couldn’t even come up with something comforting to say. Just one more failure to add to the pile. So instead he just sat there and held onto Sans’s arm while his little brother cried into the otherwise silent room.


End file.
